"The paper expanded during the first several years of his ownership, but the company has sputtered more recently. Matt Murray, The Post’s executive editor, said on a call Wednesday morning with newsroom employees that the company had lost too much money for too long and had not been meeting readers’ needs. He said that all sections would be affected in some way, and that the result would be a publication focused even more on national news and politics, as well as business and health, and far less on other areas."
What's it to Bezos? Why doesn't he just bankroll the operation? Make it so good it's worthy of spending money on?
A famous question: "Now, tell me honestly, my boy, don't you think it's rather unwise to continue this philanthropic enterprise, this
Inquirer that's costing you a million dollar a year?" Famously answered:
-- Why doesn't he just bankroll the operation? Make it so good it's worthy of spending money on?-- Because it is already 10 times the cost of Charmin toilet paper.
This is simply a way to make employees want to leave WaPo in a time where journalists can look forward to increasing obscurity. Bezos would be well advised to replace as much as he can with AI and junk the rest. If he had to, merely the WaPo subscriber database, past and present, would be very valuable to the right people.
Bezos is finding that owning a newspaper business isn't nearly as good a social media presence in the world as owning X, which apparently is back to being a profitable venture for Musk.
First rule of business: Maybe Bezos is simply clearing the Post of all those who caused the decline in the first place?
What struck me most watching that clip, however, was how much Orson Wells' facial expressions reminded my of Leo DiCaprio's acting style. For example, his smile when he delivers the line, "I'll have to close this place in 60 years."
Famously answered, but with a famous outcome: Xanadu, Rosebud, and a snow globe falling from Kane's bed. I certainly hope that Lauren Sánchez sings well.
Eighteen Pulitzer prizes since 2013, including: 1. Coverage of Jan 6, 2021 insurrection 2. Investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election (!) 3. 2016 coverage of police shootings 4. 2017 David Fahrenthold's coverage of Donald Trump's charitable giving
That progressive clickbait must be a real gold mine.
After the massive failure that was the Covington March for Life incident, and the WaPo's failure to publicly admit any wrongdoing, I can't get worked up over the collapse of the institution. That's one of many failures, but going after a random teenage male will never not stick in my craw.
Orson Welles' last role was the planet eating elder god Unicron in the 1986 animated classic Transformers: The Movie. Ironically, despite him hating the part, the film is a cult classic and is fondly remembered for Welles' absolute banger delivery of a massive eldritch horror robot.
He tried, or at least started down that path, and rapidly figured out that almost nobody is willing to work as an actual reporter versus a jurn-o-lister.
Scott Adams theorized that Bezos was arm twisted into turning WaPo into an Intel agency front in exchange for protection of his other businesses. WaPo led the charge in canceling Adams.
Welles was a great filmmaker. The shootout in the hall of mirrors in "The Lady From Shanghai" is incredible, as is the continuous tracking shot that opens "Touch of Evil." And Kane is stupendous from start to finish.
Anyone who has followed WaPo knows it's been in hospice for many months now . Free press is not compatible with Bezos business priorities and interests.
As is true with all deaths, it has been ugly full of denials and pretense.
Turns out democracy doesn't die in darkness. It drowns in corruption, ignorance, and lies.
“If the WaPo really leans in hard to anti-woke takes then maybe they could get a valuation as big as $150 million from a billionaire looking to curry favor with the administration.” ~Tim Miller
WaPo, like the times and most newspapers, decided decades ago that ideology was more important than truth. Reality is that if Harris were now President, Bezos would be adding more people, especially left wing hacks. Bezos and other billionaires don't care who is in the White House, they care about being the ruling elites, and treating the rest of us as wage slaves. they understand that money and power can buy them Congress, and anyone they want. If journalists like Salena Zito were the majority, none of this would be happening.
Is it possible that the cuts are a sign that Bezos has actually started to figure out how to build and maintain a profitable publication on the internet? First you have to cut out the slack?
The WaPo coverage of international and national affairs cant be distinguished from the NYT's or the other liberal/left papers. And why would anyone read the WaPO for sports, when they can go to ESPNs website?
The WaPo never investigates Democrat Presidents. And after its Russia gate coverage and non-stop attacks on Trump since August 2015, it has zero credibility as a non-partisan news source.
I don't know why he bought it, and I don't know why he cares that it's losing money. But I'm not going to look this particular gift horse in the mouth. Three hundred of the evil little fuckers! Chances are, most of them will never have another job. Who's going to hire them? NYT? Harvard? Some NGO?
"The cuts are a sign that Jeff Bezos, who became one of the world’s richest people by selling things on the internet, has not yet figured out how to build and maintain a profitable publication on the internet."
Now that's a stupid writer.
It's not Bezos' job to figure out how teh WaPo makes money, it's the people working for the WaPo.
That the vast majority of the people working at the WaPo couldn't care less about producing a paper that can attract a large enough audience to even break even is why so many of them are being fired.
Yeah, it’s not Bezos’s fault, newspapers are a dying business. I think he bought for a pretty low price. Apparently not enough of them made good on their threats to quit after the paper refused to endorse Kamala.
If Bezos could get the WP to be the kind of paper he could be proud of, I bet he'd be happy to lose money on it from now till kingdom come. To make that happen, he either needs to personally run the thing, or hire somebody he respects to do the job.
What's it to Bezos? Why doesn't he just bankroll the operation? Make it so good it's worthy of spending money on?
I think laying off a huge chunk of their work force may be a necessary, if not sufficient, condition of making it good enough. When one of your problems is a bad institutional culture among the staff, it's often not sufficient just to switch out leadership (the usual paper solution). You have to break that staff culture first before new leadership can fix things. Sometimes it works; often it doesn't.
In DC, I think the transit authority WMATA has suffered from a similar culture issue, where staff would bully and retaliate against each other for doing honest safety inspections (among other things), and switching out leadership every couple of years accomplished nothing until finally the upteenths new leadership team just disciplined like half of the entire safety department (with a bunch of terminations) back in 2016, after which WMATA seems to be improving slowly.
Tech tycoons started buying media businesses in order to obtain political cover. This beganin the 1990s when the Feds took to harassing Microsoft on antitrust. Bill Gates was explicitly told to begin hiring lobbyists. Later he handed $ to NBC hence MSNBC. Bezos bought the WP as either a political payoff or insurance. Musk grabbed Twitter/X for the same reasons, I believe, initially anyway, when he in turn began to be harassed.
I can remember the old days, when newspapers were how people got most of their news. Most cities and towns of any size had a morning paper and an afternoon paper. St. Joseph, Missouri, had the St. Joseph Gazette in the morning and the St. Joseph News-Press in the afternoon when I lived there from 1968-73 as a kid. The Gazette published from 1845 to 1988. Wikipedia notes that "It was the only newspaper delivered to the West Coast on the first ride of the Pony Express in 1860." (The Pony Express is one of St. Joe's claim to fame, as well as being the site of the killing of Jesse James.)
As a boy, I read both papers every day. In the early evening, there was the network news on the three alphabet networks that existed at the time. I read the local papers wherever I lived after that: The Kansas City Times and Star, in the years when I was stationed in Germany, and then the when I moved to Florida in 1989. I subscribed to the paper for years, but eventually, as the papers became thinner and the Internet and cable news became other alternative options, I ended my subscription. My elderly father is a Luddite who has nothing to do with the internet, so he subscribed to the papers up until recently. The paper continued to get thinner and thinner, an anorexic shadow of its former self. Print simply cannot keep up with the ubiquitous availability of electronic news on our devices. As soon as it's printed, it's already out of date. Sure, it can do lengthy pieces that aren't really time-sensitive, like the recent New York Times article that Althouse shared about the Japanese pottery or various other slice of life pieces. But for breaking news, print is obsolete. And so it goes.
Local news coverage and sports are really the only reason to buy the WaPo these days. Killing that removes that reasons to subscribe. Looks like a death spiral to me. Ending a seven day a week print product is probably next. I feel sorry for the production and distribution employees who are NOT in the newsroom. They didn’t make the WaPo the terrible woke product it is today.
So to be clear, Bezos announces a new moderate shift for the Wash Post, then a bunch of journalists (and other activists) encourage people to cancel their subscriptions, which they do, resulting in more jobs now being cut?
What are they upset about then? Today is exactly what they wanted. What did they think was going to happen?
You don’t get to be a lefty, writing for a deep blue publication by having even an elementary grasp of economics.
What's it to Bezos? Why doesn't he just bankroll the operation? Make it so good it's worthy of spending money on?
Whether his goal is to turn the paper into a profitable enterprise or his goal is, as stated, to make it “worthy of spending money on,” he’s made the strategic decision that he cannot reach that goal with this pack of clowns.
The problem Bezoz has with with the Post is that the staff think they actually run it. Honestly he would have been better off setting up a paper from scratch rather than trying to make the Washington Post work.
I was surprised to read in a bio of W.R. Hearst that he was spending his late father's money, tightly managed by his mother. He practically had to ask her for spending money, to say nothing of huge expenses to expand the reach of a big-city newspaper. Color, cartoons, family and women's sections, sports, screaming headlines, and yes lies to make the paper more influential with voters. The destruction of Fatty Arbuckle; there was already a suspicion of bad acts in Hollywood, and a desire for a scapegoat.
Bezos is just being nice to his staff. He's making them martyrs which is what they all asked Santa for. They won't like it but that's another story. Good, Pretti and the 300 - they all played starring roles in 20th century movies in their heads. Who could ask for more? The rest of us will just get on with living in the actual situation in the 21st century as best we can.
gadfly, what kind of Democracy is it when you lose, and you can't handle it, so you riot and try to assassinate the President you hate so much??? Face it. You lost. Elections have consequences, as Saint Obama threw in John McCains face...Now we are throwing it in yours. THIS is what Democracy looks like. Get over itl
People don’t realize just how transformative that the internet was. It delivered the world in microseconds. The first to die were the weeklies, Time, Newsweek, Life, Look, Sports Illustrated and the rest. By the time that readers received their magazine, the stories were history and past their sell-by date. Then, inevitably, came the daily newspaper. Why pay good money for something that you could get for free? Now every print publication is fighting for their very existence. Many have concluded that their survival depends on catering to the reader base that is supposed to be the most educated and intelligent and able to afford a paid subscription. And in the process have become nothing more than an echo chamber for the far left. But that is turning out to be a suicide pact as there simply aren’t enough of them to generate enough revenue to continue publishing. Add to that a demographic that is trending ever older while failing to replace the deceased with a younger generation and you have a death spiral. Without the backing of some billionaire, most of the print media are on borrowed time.
You are wrong, EuroNole: The internet didn't kill the weeklies with speed. They were always "late" with the news, the internet didn't create that problem. What killed them was they were always dishonestly Left with the "news", and the internet meant people could get worthwhile commentary without the left wing bias.
So the more intelligent, more competent, and more employed half of their audience left them.
It's the common death spiral. A business decides to go "all Left", or it hires left wing idiots who insist on forcing their politics on everything, and the sane members of their audience stop buying.
The NYT will probably survive, because there's enough paying leftists to support ONE publication, and the NYT seems to be the one they've chosen.
But the rest are going to die, because they are all run by morons intent upon going after the same minimal market.
The Left speaks with one voice, no dissent is allowed by the True Believers. And that means that there's no point in subscribing to The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, AND the NYT. All three are going to give you the exact same thing. So one will get funded, and all the rest will die.
There is quite a contrast between the financial health of the NYT and the financial black hole that is the WP. The NYT discovered gimmicks like Wordle, features like Wirecutter, and domestic interest content like recipes. If you are a boojie lefty, the NYT is your go to source. Why do you need two sources of lefty agitprop?
Years ago, when Netflix still mailed DVDs, I ordered the "collector's edition" or some such of Citizen Kane. I had seen it years earlier, but was ready for another look. Turned out that this edition had three separate commentaries on the film, they were each quite distinctive and interesting, so I watched the whole film four times over several weeks. The commentary on the revolutionary camera tricks was the most interesting. Welles didn't know what he didn't know, so he was demanding the impossible--and getting it, from his genius cameraman.
I should have just purchased that set while it was available.
"Now, tell me honestly, my boy, don't you think it's rather unwise to continue this philanthropic enterprise, this Inquirer that's costing you a million dollar a year?
Bezos has seen the end of Citizen Kane, and knows that Kane does eventually run out of money. Plus, now he is divorced and has less money to run out of.
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78 comments:
-- Why doesn't he just bankroll the operation? Make it so good it's worthy of spending money on?--
Because it is already 10 times the cost of Charmin toilet paper.
This is simply a way to make employees want to leave WaPo in a time where journalists can look forward to increasing obscurity. Bezos would be well advised to replace as much as he can with AI and junk the rest. If he had to, merely the WaPo subscriber database, past and present, would be very valuable to the right people.
Couldn't happen to a finer bunch...
’…has not yet figured out how to build and maintain a profitable publication on the internet.’
Laying off thirty percent of the staff is a good start to the goal.
Bezos is finding that owning a newspaper business isn't nearly as good a social media presence in the world as owning X, which apparently is back to being a profitable venture for Musk.
First rule of business: Maybe Bezos is simply clearing the Post of all those who caused the decline in the first place?
What struck me most watching that clip, however, was how much Orson Wells' facial expressions reminded my of Leo DiCaprio's acting style. For example, his smile when he delivers the line, "I'll have to close this place in 60 years."
Democracy Dies in Layoffs. Or something like that.
Famously answered, but with a famous outcome: Xanadu, Rosebud, and a snow globe falling from Kane's bed. I certainly hope that Lauren Sánchez sings well.
I only knew Orson Welles from his enormous days. He was a handsome fellow! Really gotta watch that movie some day.
Therein lies the rub. Can you make it so good it’s worthy to spend money on? Doubtful with the current slate of employees.
Bezos was sucking up to the Democrats in D.C., but gave that up when he appeared on state at the Trump 47 inauguration.
Bill Gates funded Slate and MSNBC back in the 1990s when the Democrats were considering a Microsoft breakup per anti-trust laws.
Bloomberg owns Bloomberg media, and briefly tried to buy the Wall Street Journal.
Musk owns X...
He clearly admired hearsts early days but he become too far ofentified with the left
Those poor, poor journalists.
Well: let a thousand Substacks bloom.
And fight for the same shrinking sliver of actual paying audience.
At some point, it isn't that there are too many brands of dog food on the shelves, it's that all of those brands are making the exact same flavor.
The exact same flavor that many are giving away for free.
And that a lot of dogs simply don't like the taste of, anyway.
Blame the dogs, of course.
I am Laslo.
Like yglesia with his bore loudly substack
How did 300 journalists missed the rampant fraud in Minnesota again?
Eighteen Pulitzer prizes since 2013, including:
1. Coverage of Jan 6, 2021 insurrection
2. Investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election (!)
3. 2016 coverage of police shootings
4. 2017 David Fahrenthold's coverage of Donald Trump's charitable giving
That progressive clickbait must be a real gold mine.
After the massive failure that was the Covington March for Life incident, and the WaPo's failure to publicly admit any wrongdoing, I can't get worked up over the collapse of the institution. That's one of many failures, but going after a random teenage male will never not stick in my craw.
Stop lying on behalf of the corrupt democrat party. Start there.
Orson Welles' last role was the planet eating elder god Unicron in the 1986 animated classic Transformers: The Movie. Ironically, despite him hating the part, the film is a cult classic and is fondly remembered for Welles' absolute banger delivery of a massive eldritch horror robot.
Make it so good it's worthy of spending money on?
He tried, or at least started down that path, and rapidly figured out that almost nobody is willing to work as an actual reporter versus a jurn-o-lister.
’How did 300 journalists missed the rampant fraud in Minnesota again?’
I’m sure it’s easy when they’re all focused on something orange.
Scott Adams theorized that Bezos was arm twisted into turning WaPo into an Intel agency front in exchange for protection of his other businesses. WaPo led the charge in canceling Adams.
Then theres carlos slim heliu the daddy warbucks of the Times also liubimov the ex kgb oligarch that owns the independent
He was also the elusive robin masters on magnum
Welles was a great filmmaker. The shootout in the hall of mirrors in "The Lady From Shanghai" is incredible, as is the continuous tracking shot that opens "Touch of Evil." And Kane is stupendous from start to finish.
Anyone who has followed WaPo knows it's been in hospice for many months now . Free press is not compatible with Bezos business priorities and interests.
As is true with all deaths, it has been ugly full of denials and pretense.
Turns out democracy doesn't die in darkness. It drowns in corruption, ignorance, and lies.
“If the WaPo really leans in hard to anti-woke takes then maybe they could get a valuation as big as $150 million from a billionaire looking to curry favor with the administration.” ~Tim Miller
Can the 300 block the "Hot Gates" of Thermopylae?
Funny how omidyar (pay pal billuonaire) who owns the bulwark doesnt come up
WaPo, like the times and most newspapers, decided decades ago that ideology was more important than truth.
Reality is that if Harris were now President, Bezos would be adding more people, especially left wing hacks.
Bezos and other billionaires don't care who is in the White House, they care about being the ruling elites, and treating the rest of us as wage slaves.
they understand that money and power can buy them Congress, and anyone they want.
If journalists like Salena Zito were the majority, none of this would be happening.
Is it possible that the cuts are a sign that Bezos has actually started to figure out how to build and maintain a profitable publication on the internet?
First you have to cut out the slack?
Althouse was ahead of her time. Institutions giving way to individuals.
Failure is always decending on Elon. Yet it always lands on Bezos.
The WaPo coverage of international and national affairs cant be distinguished from the NYT's or the other liberal/left papers. And why would anyone read the WaPO for sports, when they can go to ESPNs website?
The WaPo never investigates Democrat Presidents. And after its Russia gate coverage and non-stop attacks on Trump since August 2015, it has zero credibility as a non-partisan news source.
I wonder whether the CIA will offer to make a contribution keep the current staffing in place.
WaPoo? WaPout.
The activists who pose as journalists at WAPO can always get a job at The National Enquirer!! They are really good at making up stories!!!
JournoLism is a poor player that struts and frets its hour...
I too wish some billionaire would give me money. Or, for that matter, that the government would give me someone else’s money.
Sadly, neither seems likely.
I don't know why he bought it, and I don't know why he cares that it's losing money. But I'm not going to look this particular gift horse in the mouth. Three hundred of the evil little fuckers! Chances are, most of them will never have another job. Who's going to hire them? NYT? Harvard? Some NGO?
By dropping 300 Bezos is saving his $77mm per year just in salary and fringes. Not even counting expenses, travel, and office overhead.
"The cuts are a sign that Jeff Bezos, who became one of the world’s richest people by selling things on the internet, has not yet figured out how to build and maintain a profitable publication on the internet."
Now that's a stupid writer.
It's not Bezos' job to figure out how teh WaPo makes money, it's the people working for the WaPo.
That the vast majority of the people working at the WaPo couldn't care less about producing a paper that can attract a large enough audience to even break even is why so many of them are being fired.
This is known as justice.
Unlike Kane, Bezos appears to have no ambition for public office.
A few hundred million a year is rounding-error money for Bezos.
So either this is about appeasing Trump — or there’s a more uncomfortable possibility:
Pulitzer asked, “Is this good for democracy?”
Bezos asks, “Does this business model still work?”
What is implicit in the fact that not enough people value the "truth" which the WP offers to trade $1 toward its profitability?
As clay and buck noticed these publications have become fanzines for the left
Yeah, it’s not Bezos’s fault, newspapers are a dying business. I think he bought for a pretty low price. Apparently not enough of them made good on their threats to quit after the paper refused to endorse Kamala.
If Bezos could get the WP to be the kind of paper he could be proud of, I bet he'd be happy to lose money on it from now till kingdom come. To make that happen, he either needs to personally run the thing, or hire somebody he respects to do the job.
Clearly Bezos, like Musk, has no clue
Maybe strangling the paper into what it has become was Jeff's plan from the start and his investments are beginning to bare fruit.
I'd say "learn to code," except Bezos is also laying off a ton of (American) programmers and engineers.
What's it to Bezos? Why doesn't he just bankroll the operation? Make it so good it's worthy of spending money on?
I think laying off a huge chunk of their work force may be a necessary, if not sufficient, condition of making it good enough. When one of your problems is a bad institutional culture among the staff, it's often not sufficient just to switch out leadership (the usual paper solution). You have to break that staff culture first before new leadership can fix things. Sometimes it works; often it doesn't.
In DC, I think the transit authority WMATA has suffered from a similar culture issue, where staff would bully and retaliate against each other for doing honest safety inspections (among other things), and switching out leadership every couple of years accomplished nothing until finally the upteenths new leadership team just disciplined like half of the entire safety department (with a bunch of terminations) back in 2016, after which WMATA seems to be improving slowly.
Tech tycoons started buying media businesses in order to obtain political cover. This beganin the 1990s when the Feds took to harassing Microsoft on antitrust. Bill Gates was explicitly told to begin hiring lobbyists. Later he handed $ to NBC hence MSNBC. Bezos bought the WP as either a political payoff or insurance. Musk grabbed Twitter/X for the same reasons, I believe, initially anyway, when he in turn began to be harassed.
All these laid off WaPo journolists can now find a job they are qualified to do- lots of parks have too much dogshit on their grass- job opportunity.
I can remember the old days, when newspapers were how people got most of their news. Most cities and towns of any size had a morning paper and an afternoon paper. St. Joseph, Missouri, had the St. Joseph Gazette in the morning and the St. Joseph News-Press in the afternoon when I lived there from 1968-73 as a kid. The Gazette published from 1845 to 1988. Wikipedia notes that "It was the only newspaper delivered to the West Coast on the first ride of the Pony Express in 1860." (The Pony Express is one of St. Joe's claim to fame, as well as being the site of the killing of Jesse James.)
As a boy, I read both papers every day. In the early evening, there was the network news on the three alphabet networks that existed at the time. I read the local papers wherever I lived after that: The Kansas City Times and Star, in the years when I was stationed in Germany, and then the when I moved to Florida in 1989. I subscribed to the paper for years, but eventually, as the papers became thinner and the Internet and cable news became other alternative options, I ended my subscription. My elderly father is a Luddite who has nothing to do with the internet, so he subscribed to the papers up until recently. The paper continued to get thinner and thinner, an anorexic shadow of its former self. Print simply cannot keep up with the ubiquitous availability of electronic news on our devices. As soon as it's printed, it's already out of date. Sure, it can do lengthy pieces that aren't really time-sensitive, like the recent New York Times article that Althouse shared about the Japanese pottery or various other slice of life pieces. But for breaking news, print is obsolete. And so it goes.
The Stars and Stripes in the years when I was stationed in Germany... Somehow that wasn't formatted right.
then the Fort Myers News-Press when I moved to Florida in 1989... Jesus, I made a hash of that!
Local news coverage and sports are really the only reason to buy the WaPo these days. Killing that removes that reasons to subscribe. Looks like a death spiral to me. Ending a seven day a week print product is probably next. I feel sorry for the production and distribution employees who are NOT in the newsroom. They didn’t make the WaPo the terrible woke product it is today.
From X via Instapundit:
Stephen L. Miller
@redsteeze
So to be clear, Bezos announces a new moderate shift for the Wash Post, then a bunch of journalists (and other activists) encourage people to cancel their subscriptions, which they do, resulting in more jobs now being cut?
What are they upset about then? Today is exactly what they wanted. What did they think was going to happen?
You don’t get to be a lefty, writing for a deep blue publication by having even an elementary grasp of economics.
What's it to Bezos? Why doesn't he just bankroll the operation? Make it so good it's worthy of spending money on?
Whether his goal is to turn the paper into a profitable enterprise or his goal is, as stated, to make it “worthy of spending money on,” he’s made the strategic decision that he cannot reach that goal with this pack of clowns.
The problem Bezoz has with with the Post is that the staff think they actually run it. Honestly he would have been better off setting up a paper from scratch rather than trying to make the Washington Post work.
I was surprised to read in a bio of W.R. Hearst that he was spending his late father's money, tightly managed by his mother. He practically had to ask her for spending money, to say nothing of huge expenses to expand the reach of a big-city newspaper. Color, cartoons, family and women's sections, sports, screaming headlines, and yes lies to make the paper more influential with voters. The destruction of Fatty Arbuckle; there was already a suspicion of bad acts in Hollywood, and a desire for a scapegoat.
Bezos is just being nice to his staff. He's making them martyrs which is what they all asked Santa for. They won't like it but that's another story. Good, Pretti and the 300 - they all played starring roles in 20th century movies in their heads. Who could ask for more? The rest of us will just get on with living in the actual situation in the 21st century as best we can.
“I wonder whether the CIA will offer to make a contribution keep the current staffing in place.“
They can’t,
they have no Venezuelan fentanyl money coming in now.
Well. it is a high school newspaper. Public high school. All the smart kids go to private schools.
Stephen Colbert tells us that the official slogan of the Washington Post has changed from "Democracy Dies in Darkness" to "Democracy: Die! Die! Die!"
When the WAPO and NYT go out of business, half the blogosphere will have nothing to write about.
What would althouse become without the MSM?
gadfly, what kind of Democracy is it when you lose, and you can't handle it, so you riot and try to assassinate the President you hate so much??? Face it. You lost. Elections have consequences, as Saint Obama threw in John McCains face...Now we are throwing it in yours. THIS is what Democracy looks like. Get over itl
People don’t realize just how transformative that the internet was. It delivered the world in microseconds. The first to die were the weeklies, Time, Newsweek, Life, Look, Sports Illustrated and the rest. By the time that readers received their magazine, the stories were history and past their sell-by date. Then, inevitably, came the daily newspaper. Why pay good money for something that you could get for free? Now every print publication is fighting for their very existence. Many have concluded that their survival depends on catering to the reader base that is supposed to be the most educated and intelligent and able to afford a paid subscription. And in the process have become nothing more than an echo chamber for the far left. But that is turning out to be a suicide pact as there simply aren’t enough of them to generate enough revenue to continue publishing. Add to that a demographic that is trending ever older while failing to replace the deceased with a younger generation and you have a death spiral. Without the backing of some billionaire, most of the print media are on borrowed time.
You are wrong, EuroNole: The internet didn't kill the weeklies with speed. They were always "late" with the news, the internet didn't create that problem. What killed them was they were always dishonestly Left with the "news", and the internet meant people could get worthwhile commentary without the left wing bias.
So the more intelligent, more competent, and more employed half of their audience left them.
It's the common death spiral. A business decides to go "all Left", or it hires left wing idiots who insist on forcing their politics on everything, and the sane members of their audience stop buying.
The NYT will probably survive, because there's enough paying leftists to support ONE publication, and the NYT seems to be the one they've chosen.
But the rest are going to die, because they are all run by morons intent upon going after the same minimal market.
The Left speaks with one voice, no dissent is allowed by the True Believers. And that means that there's no point in subscribing to The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, AND the NYT. All three are going to give you the exact same thing. So one will get funded, and all the rest will die.
Couldn't happen to more deserving people
There is quite a contrast between the financial health of the NYT and the financial black hole that is the WP. The NYT discovered gimmicks like Wordle, features like Wirecutter, and domestic interest content like recipes. If you are a boojie lefty, the NYT is your go to source. Why do you need two sources of lefty agitprop?
Years ago, when Netflix still mailed DVDs, I ordered the "collector's edition" or some such of Citizen Kane. I had seen it years earlier, but was ready for another look. Turned out that this edition had three separate commentaries on the film, they were each quite distinctive and interesting, so I watched the whole film four times over several weeks. The commentary on the revolutionary camera tricks was the most interesting. Welles didn't know what he didn't know, so he was demanding the impossible--and getting it, from his genius cameraman.
I should have just purchased that set while it was available.
Kak: "Turns out democracy doesn't die in darkness. It drowns in corruption, ignorance, and lies."
I don't know about corruption but "ignorance and lies" is an apt description of the Washington Post product.
"Now, tell me honestly, my boy, don't you think it's rather unwise to continue this philanthropic enterprise, this Inquirer that's costing you a million dollar a year?
Bezos has seen the end of Citizen Kane, and knows that Kane does eventually run out of money. Plus, now he is divorced and has less money to run out of.
What's it to Bezos? Why doesn't he just bankroll the operation? Make it so good it's worthy of spending money on?
That would require money and effort.
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